In a series of stories we ask Australia's strategy gurus about the keys to growth.

John Meacock is a little exasperated with the mindset of Australia's corporate leaders.

"The lack of activity in thinking about new business models in this country has been frustrating," he says.

He reflects on the lack of preparedness by Australian retailers for the Amazon onslaught, which they would have seen coming for years.

"I just don't understand the Amazon thing. Why wouldn't they look at it and say, 'Hey, the stuff they are doing, I can do it and beat my competitors'? You look at so many of our department stores and there's nothing that defines a difference."

Meacock, who heads strategy for Deloitte Asia Pacific, and is also Deloitte's global vice-chairman, has typically supported corporate boards. "But over the last few years they haven't been pushing hard enough on the model."

Related Quotes

He says board members he's spoken to have told him changing internal processes is very difficult. When they try, the chief information officer says, "We can't do that with our systems."

There's a sense of frustration about how to push through, he says. "Boards are going to have to challenge harder to shift this mindset. Boards have to take some of the responsibility because for many industries, particularly in banking and even in professional services, it's gonna be death by a thousand cuts."

New skill sets are required to turn services into products as technologies such as artificial intelligence and chat bots become more common. "All that sort of stuff requires a new way of thinking," Meacock says. "The challenge is how do you bring people along to make sure they can do it?"

For a CEO, the big question is: "How do I get that balance right: of investing and maintaining the probability of today, while I grow the new business?

"There are new things that they could be doing now, but it's hard to pick where is that inflection point. When does the new model kick in? When are you at that point of inevitability where the new model becomes the dominant model?"

Eking out a profit

Even Deloitte had its own challenges building an innovative new business: the Connect platform, which initially had 1500 customers. He says that although it was profitable it wasn't chasing scale.

"I said, 'This is completely wrong, because we're eking a profit out of this thing, we're not going for growth. We should have had 20,000 customers and been prepared to take a loss on the basis of building and capturing a customer base rather than that classic mentality.' "

He points fingers elsewhere. Some media businesses - but not The Australian Financial Review - gave away their privileged assets, their content, and their journalism to build Facebook's and Google's businesses.

It's crucial in the face of disruption that businesses understand their core competency. "That, 'Oh, we'll just give it away and it'll bring people to us,' sort of stuff, it was lunacy.

"People don't really understand what it is that actually drives their business."

There are chinks of light, but the complacent, glass half full mentality is still rampant.

Bankers worry that key executives think they have "an irrefutable right to be in the middle of everything, rather than really understanding that the world changed and they may not be," Meacock says.

While Facebook may face trust issues about taking retail payments, Apple is trusted and Amazon is already a massive payment organisation.

"I think one thing you will see over the next two years, Facebook and Google have been remarkably good at avoiding regulation. That may change soon."

The other big shift this year, he says, will be the intensifying use of artificial intelligence and algorithms to make decisions, deliver differential pricing or differential advertising.

"You add that to the world of increasing regulation and of consumer advocacy. This thing is going to break sometime in the next two years to be a massive issue. People are going to be more and more fearful about this intelligence and of who's making the decision.

"Some customers are becoming more suspicious about deals they are offered online. It won't take a lot for someone to start a social media campaign around an insurance company or a bank or someone providing differential pricing."